Counterbalancing Egalitarian Benevolence: A History of Interpretations of Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription in Song China and Joseon Korea

Abstract

The objective of my work is to explore the history of philosophical discourses initiated by Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription within the Neo-Confucian tradition in Song China and in Joseon Korea. Particularly, it concerns the ground-breaking process of reinterpreting the inscription, through which the founders of the Neo-Confucian tradition—Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi—rendered benevolence as egalitarian and ultimately sought to locate an equilibrium between this egalitarian ideal and the non-egalitarian settings of pre-modern China and Korea. My work also shows how the conception of liyi fenshu 理一分殊 (“the unity of principle and the difference in application”) was initially conceived, specifically, in order to counterbalance this idealistic view of benevolence with more realistic aspects of differentiations and discriminations by resorting to the concept of righteousness. In the last three chapters, I contrast this process during the formative stage of Neo-Confucianism with the brief history of the interpretations of the inscription from late Goryeo through the end of Joseon.